Whatever happened to those ‘guardrails’ for Eric Adams?

In February, at the height of Mayor Eric Adams’ legal troubles and entanglements with the Trump administration, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a three-pronged plan to increase the state’s oversight of New York City. The proposal came after intense public scrutiny as many called on Hochul to do something to address the crisis of confidence in Adams and his perceived subservience to President Donald Trump. By the time that the state legislative session ended in June, though, the governor had little to show for her proposal. 

Only one part of the plan ultimately received approval from state lawmakers: a minor funding increase for the state deputy comptroller for New York City. The governor quietly tucked the money into an appropriations bill when she announced amendments to her executive budget proposal at the end of February. In an accompanying document, Hochul said the extra cash was to “support (the office of the state comptroller) in their statutory responsibility to assist the New York State Financial Control Board for the City of New York.” The money was ultimately included in the final version of the budget, which passed over a month late in May. 

The office’s budget for New York City increased from $4.848 million, the number it had stayed at for Hochul’s first three budgets, to $5.543 million. A small portion of the hike came at the request of the state comptroller’s office, but the majority – $620,000 – came as a result of the governor’s bid to increase oversight of Adams. According to a spokesperson for the state comptroller, the new money will be used “to monitor the flow of federal funding, review the distribution of federal aid as compared to historical trends” and to better work with city government fiscal authorities “to identify requests that are unique” to the city as they relate to federal executive orders. 

A funding increase for a state agency was the easiest part of Hochul’s proposal to enact as it required no new statutory language for state lawmakers to debate and approve. Her other pitches – to create a new special state inspector general whose only job would be to keep an eye on the mayor and to allow more city officials to sue the federal government – went nowhere. Both proposed changes would have required support from not just state legislators, but members of the City Council as well. Neither group expressed much support for the measures, and Hochul didn’t expend much energy to lobby for them, either. So the more significant guardrails never received legislative language, and they fizzled out long before the end of the legislative session.

Hochul had intended the additional oversight to apply to Adams, whose term ends this year. But she didn’t rule out the potential for extending them had they passed. At the time, Adams was still running in the Democratic primary for a second term, a contest that he seemed unlikely to win. But he has since decided to run as an independent, which means that he’s still in the running to remain mayor. Adams now finds himself in a situation where both he and fellow Democrat-turned-independent Andrew Cuomo are urging the other drop out in order to defeat Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee.